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Feel the fire, stay in the kitchen

April 25, 2018

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At the time of writing, we are currently in a season called “Power Lines” at COM Church. In between Easter and Pentecost, we are looking at living life in the Spirit and what that means for us as Christians. Throughout the last few weeks, we have heard testimony of the amazing power of Jesus at work in the lives of fellow Christians and there is a spirit of anticipation growing inside each of our Sunday meetings. People are being touched, lives are being changed and the Lord is moving.

This has all got me thinking however; what are the “key ingredients” for revival or a move of God? Is a move of God sovereign or is it something we can usher in?

Pastor Helena started our series by talking on The Same Power – Romans 8:11 – that we have the same power that raised Jesus from the dead living within us. With this line of thinking, it made me wonder why we always call out for more power, and a greater measure of the Holy Spirit, when in actual fact we already have the Spirit of Jesus living inside of us. There’s no junior Holy Spirit for children, and there’s no second rate Holy Spirit for new Christians, or those who have backslidden. Ephesians 1:13 says that when we receive salvation we are sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit. He’s in all of us that believe.

So if that is the case, why do we not see more miracles, or greater moves of the Spirit? Jesus says in John 14:12 that we’ll see greater things than He did, yet I can’t say I’ve even seen one person raised from the dead.

Whilst we all have the power of Jesus inside of us, we need to know how to activate that power, in order to see it work. For example, we could have a bank card with £10,000 on but until we activate the card and put the right pin in, the card is useless. Some of us just need to believe that the bank account has the money in at all! Bill Johnson says “The Holy Spirit is trapped inside the body of unbelieving believers” – how many of us are unaware of the power that remains available to us as Christians?

What I’ve discovered over the last few weeks are a few things that I think increase our hunger for the Lord and also increase the measure in which we see Him move in our lives and in our services. These are by no means definitive, but do encompass the values of our Power Lines series:

We must live lives entirely submitted to God – life in the Spirit. When we sing to the Lord “take all of me” do we really mean it? Are we prepared to surrender every decision and every moment of our lives to Him? Do we choose Him first or is the Lord just a safety net for when our own choices don’t work?

We must persist in prayer and earnestly seek Him. The precursor to fire falling is always prayer and worship. We see this at Pentecost when the people of God were gathered together in a meeting and the Holy Spirit moved on them in tongues of fire. If we want to see a move of the Spirit we should be persisting in prayer and worship. When we worship we are not just lifting up our praises to the Lord, but we are also creating an atmosphere for Him to move – we’re saying “we’re ready for you Lord”. Psalm 22:3 talks about the Lord inhabiting the praises of His people. When we lift up our praises to Him – He falls down on us.

When it starts to get messy we must push in further. Sometimes when the Lord starts moving it doesn’t always look like we want it to. At Pentecost there were people who even thought that the disciples were drunk when the fire fell on them. We must be open to Jesus messing things up and doing things in a way that might make us uncomfortable. He might have to turn the tables in our lives before the wind of the Spirit can blow through. We need to be ready to see people from the fringes of our community walk through the doors of our building – the homeless, the broken, the marginalised – and not reject them. The Bible talks about God pouring out His Spirit on all flesh – not just those who we choose.

I really believe that we are in an exciting season and we are just scratching the surface of what it means to live a “life in the Spirit”. My heart aches to see more people healed, set free and saved by the grace of Jesus and as we continue to press in, submit to Him and persist in prayer, I know we can only expect to see more of this. Let’s, however, not be caught napping when He does come, and let’s not run out the kitchen when it starts to get hot!